Sculpt:
Overall, the sculpts are again exceptional. (Except for Feiya's face which had no detail on it, other than a slight hump where her nose should be.)
Paint:
The paint jobs may be the worst I have seen yet. The sloppy paint jobs appear on many of the minis (even the ice elementals which only have 2 colors -- clearly they need to practice their dry-brushing techniques.) Many of my bases I received also have a lot of over-paint and dry-brushing on them, and a few messy globs of glue where figures were mounted to the base.
My Feiya is pretty much the same in appearance as many others have mentioned above in other posts -- it is really aweful to look at. Sadly, I think the sculpt is mostly to blame. It is hard for the painter to give good detail to the eyes, nose and mouth, when they do not exist on the sculpt. That said, a reasonable effort should have been made to paint on a face. My Feiya's mouth is painted on her neck.
The flesh washes applied to the human characters was horrible! WizKids took a step back about 10 years, to when they applied a rusty-brown colored wash to their Mage Knight figures which made them look cheap. They used the same wash now and it does not blend well with the flesh colors used, and it didn't settle into the low areas like it should. Instead my figures have splotchy faces which makes them appear to be diseased, rotting or sun-burnt. As much as I appreciate the use of washes on these figures (something almost unheard of for the D&D line), in this case I would have preferred that no wash was used, rather than the haphazardly executed flesh washes these minis received.
Packaging:
The way these were packed did seem to work. I only received 1 broken mini - which was a falcon that had sheered off where the flight stand meets the base. Given how many of these minis were on flight stands and so little breakage I received, it appears that just wrapping the minis in bubble wrap and randomly putting them in with the large mini does seem to work. (Although oddly enough, I had 1 box where all the minis were wrapped in just plastic bags -- I guess they ran out of bubble wrap, or someone didn't get the memo). The down side of sticking these in bubble wrap, is that every mini which was holding a weapon has that weapon bent, warped and twisted. I'm not thrilled by this, but a broken weapon disappoints me more than a bent weapon.
Summary:
Overall, from a collector's point of view I do really like the variety of miniatures in the set. If I ever do run RoW, I'm sure I'll be very happy to have purchased this set. If they can just get the sloppy painting addressed for future sets, I will continue to be a happy Pathfinder Battles customer :)
